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New Evidence Suggests Pontius Pilate Built a Road for Jewish Pilgrims https://dev.mosaicmagazine.com/picks/history-ideas/2019/10/new-evidence-suggests-pontius-pilate-built-a-road-for-jewish-pilgrims/

October 24, 2019 | JNS
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Built in Jerusalem’s City of David during the Second Temple period, the so-called “Pilgrimage Road” led from the Siloam pool to the Temple Mount. In a recent study of the coins found beneath the road, archaeologists have dated it to the tenure of Pontius Pilate—who, according to the New Testament, presided over the trial of Jesus—as the Roman governor of Judea, from roughly 26 to 37 CE. JNS reports:

According to Donald Ariel, an archaeologist and coin expert with the Israel Antiquities Authority, “Dating coins is very exact. As some coins have the year in which they were minted on them, what that means is that if a coin with a date on it is found beneath the street, the street had to be built in the same year or [in the year] after that coin had been minted.” . . .

He suggested the possibility that Pilate had the street built to reduce tensions between the Romans and the Jewish population. Although “we can’t know for sure,” he said, “these reasons do find support in the historical documents.”

Although the excavation of the road began more than a century ago following its discovery in 1894 by British archaeologists, in the past six years Israeli archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority and Tel Aviv University uncovered 350 meters of the road as well as artifacts such as coins, cooking pots, complete stone and clay tools, rare glass items, a dais used for public announcements, and parts of arrows and catapults.

Read more on JNS: https://www.jns.org/pontius-pilate-built-jerusalems-pilgrimage-road-say-israeli-archaeologists/